Can Andy Burnham meet Britain’s climate moment?
It is now all but certain that Andy Burnham will become our next Prime Minister.
Indeed, he is now so overwhelmingly popular within the Parliamentary Labour Party that no serious challenger appears willing to stand against him. If no one else steps forward, Burnham is expected to enter Number 10 on 20th July.
Yesterday, he began to set out his vision for the country. There were interesting and bold ideas here, particularly around devolving greater power to local leaders.
But one omission stood out.
In more than six minutes outlining his vision for Britain, climate was not mentioned once.
By itself, that would not be especially worrying. Not every speech can address every issue, and this one was specifically focused on the economy. However, it is the context in which his first major vision speech was delivered that matters.
The timing could hardly have been more striking.
We are just coming out of a heatwave that shattered June temperature records. It coincided with London Climate Action Week, which I was due to attend. So intense was the heat that I had to cancel my attendance, and several events across the week were similarly cancelled – including one on extreme heat adaptation.
Cancelled events, however, were the least of our concerns.
It is estimated that this heatwave contributed to the deaths of some 1,300 people across Europe.
This is no longer theoretical.
Much of the media coverage was deeply revealing. Alongside reports of red weather warnings came images of families on beaches and children eating ice creams.
But this was not a story about summer.
It was a story about death, wildfire, crop failure and the accelerating reality of climate breakdown.
The disconnect was everywhere. One minute the BBC was reporting record temperatures. The next it was discussing further North Sea drilling, with almost no acknowledgement that continued fossil fuel extraction is precisely what is driving these increasingly deadly extremes.
I wrote more about this extraordinary failure to join the dots in a recent Substack, which you can read here.
What we need from our new Prime Minister is not reassuring rhetoric, but evidence that he understands the scale of the emergency.
So far, that evidence has been disappointingly thin from Burnham. Of course, he is not yet in office, so let us hold onto a little hope.
There are fears that Burnham will roll back the UK’s already insufficient climate targets, as Reform and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives would like to do. Such are those concerns that Zack Polanski and several trade unions have written to him urging him not to weaken Britain’s commitments.
Maintaining our existing climate commitments is necessary. But it is no longer sufficient.
As this heatwave has demonstrated, Britain is woefully ill-prepared for the impacts of climate breakdown. We need to build resilience into our communities, our infrastructure and our institutions.
As I have repeatedly said, and reflect on in this recent article for Cambridge University Press, we must take strategic adaptation more seriously. Anything less than a genuinely national effort to prepare Britain for accelerating climate impacts will represent a failure of political leadership.
This week, climate breakdown became impossible to ignore.
The question now is whether our new Prime Minister is prepared to govern accordingly.
Cometh the day…
Thank you for your interest in my work and please share it widely.
Rupert